Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win?

Any review of the recent ups and downs of U.S. labor must start in Michigan, long a bastion of blue-collar unionism rooted in car manufacturing. Fifteen months ago, this Midwestern industrial state became another notch in the belt of the National Right to Work Committee, joining the not-very-desirable company of Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and twenty other “open shop” states.

The emergence of sun-belt labor relations in the birthplace of the United Auto Workers (UAW) was shocking to some. But this political setback was preceded by high-profile defeats in neighboring states that began in 2005. First Indiana, followed by Wisconsin and Ohio, stripped public workers of their bargaining rights (although the Republican attack on government employees was later repelled by popular referendum in the Buckeye State). Then in early 2012, GOP legislators in Indiana passed a right-to-work law applicable to private industry. It banned any further negotiation of labor-management agreements that compelled workers to make a financial contribution to the cost of union representation, in established bargaining units or newly organized ones.1

In November 2012, organized labor tried to buck the emerging anti-union trend with two ballot questions designed to strengthen public-sector bargaining rights in Michigan. Despite the expenditure of many millions of dollars by affiliates of the AFL-CIO and Change To Win, both measures were defeated.2 In its lame-duck session just a few weeks later, GOP legislators in Lansing took retaliatory aim at union security in Michigan’s private sector. When the region’s latest “right to work” bill landed on his desk, Republican Governor Rick Snyder was most pleased to sign it into law.

During the intervening political furor, even labor’s “friend” in the White House, felt compelled to speak out. “We should do everything we can to keep creating good middle-class jobs that help folks rebuild security for their families,” Barack Obama told a union crowd in Detroit, after his own reelection victory. “What we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions. The so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws—they don’t have to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.”3

A Battered Workforce

Unfortunately, by this point in Obama’s presidency, working for less money, with fewer job rights or benefits and little employment security, was an experience shared by millions of white-collar and blue-collar workers. Even those still lucky enough to have union contracts (just 11.3 percent of the workforce in 2012) were battered by the great Wall Street meltdown and its continuing aftershocks. When push came to shove in 2008–2009, there was much emergency relief for those at the top of our economic pyramid and far less for the millions of wage earners and homeowners at the bottom. The latter suffered from layoffs, pay cuts, loss of home equity, and the evaporation of retirement savings. As a result, by 2013 overall employee compensation—including health and retirement benefits—dropped “to its lowest share of national income in more than 50 years while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share over that time.”4

Union members had more protection, of course, but only if their legal rights were not undermined by political friends and foes alike, both influenced to varying degrees by corporate funders. Just as President Obama’s own tutorial on the politics and economics of “right-to-work” failed to sway Governor Snyder in Michigan, labor’s efforts to enlist prominent Democrats in a vigorous defense of unionism has been a serial disappointment. During Obama’s first term, the desperate plea to “Save Our Unions!” often fell on deaf ears among labor’s supposed allies in Washington and many state capitals. From New York to California, Democratic governors and other public office holders joined the budget-cutting Republican chorus criticizing teachers and other government workers or seeking to curb their bargaining rights.

Thanks to this bipartisan hostility and/or indifference to collective bargaining, U.S. labor can expect little respite from its uphill battles in recent years, despite much initial union relief over Obama’s defeat of Mitt Romney. Throughout our last three decades of retreat and defeat, the generally agreed-upon left-wing formula for union revitalization has been a “to-do” list more easily recited than implemented. In some combination or fashion, most labor leftists agree that unions should resist contract concessions, do more systematic and radical membership education, become internally democratic, engage in direct action on the job, organize the unorganized (particularly foreign-born workers), build cross-border solidarity, and get involved in broader community-labor alliances leading to greater independence from the Democratic Party.

If this recipe for change were easy, there would have been far more union transformation than we have seen to date. Instead, thousands of dedicated labor activists have toiled diligently, for years, to change their own particular nook or cranny in the “house of labor,” while myriad private and now public sector enemies have tried to demolish the whole shaky structure. Reform campaigns, new organizing initiatives, and some high-profile bargaining standoffs have helped slow the process of de-unionization and contract unraveling, but they have yet to reverse the steady decline in union membership and bargaining clout.

As Labor Notes reported, unions confronted with impending open-shop conditions in Michigan rushed to lock in automatic dues deduction for one more contract term, before the new state law went into effect. But the quid pro quo was “long, concessionary contracts” that will not enhance dues collection on a voluntary basis in the future. When that day comes—and some disgruntled workers drop their union membership or cease to be “agency fee”-payers—their unions will still have the legal obligation to represent them, a financial burden that can be debilitating over time.5

Unexpected Uprisings

Since 2011, an unexpected wave of collective activity, involving workers and their allies, inside and outside of unions, has become a beacon of hope for saving our unions. In all its diverse manifestations, this multi-front struggle has been a revolt, from below, against “the right to work for less money.” In both the public and private sector, older forms of protest—like tent cities, worker sit-downs, building occupations, civil disobedience, and quickie strikes—were recast by a new generation of activists searching for effective ways to resist corporate domination and workplace exploitation, by linking labor and community concerns.

In the year following the big midterm Republican gains in 2010, the uprising by Wisconsin public employees and the more diffuse Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement both mounted a long-overdue challenge to working-class disempowerment and the not unrelated growth of income inequality. From their earliest stage, the mass marches and rallies in Madison sought to unite private and public sector workers, and thwart Governor Scott Walker’s right-wing populist strategy of “divide and conquer.” The demonstrators (and occupiers) included public-service providers and those who rely on tax-supported state and local programs, working together as allies, not fiscal policy adversaries. Whereas the Tea Party activity of 2009–2010 had scapegoated taxes, immigrants, and big government, Wisconsin and OWS refocused public attention on the real threat to all working people, namely the power of big business and the political agenda of those doing its bidding.

Both protest movements also gave our timorous, unimaginative, and politically ambivalent unions an ideological dope-slap, not to mention a much-needed injection of youthful energy and ideas. AFL-CIO union leaders first sought an infusion of those scarce commodities in labor when they jetted into Wisconsin in the winter of 2011. Without their planning or direction, the spontaneous community-labor uprising in Madison managed to reframe the debate about public-sector bargaining throughout the United States. So the top officialdom flocked to the scene even though the protests were launched from the bottom-up, rather than in response to union headquarters directives from Washington, DC. Six months later, OWS became another Lourdes for the old, lame, and blind of American labor. Union leaders began making regular visits to Zuccotti Park and other high-profile encampments around the country, offering material aid and union reinforcements for Occupy-related marches and rallies.

Occupied Labor?

Based on this interaction with the 99%, Stuart Applebaum—a New York City union leader whose annual earnings put him near the 1%, income-wise—assured the media that “the Occupy movement has changed unions.” The question was: How much? And in what fashion? It would be a miraculous transformation indeed if organized labor, inspired by OWS, suddenly embraced more direct action, greater democratic decision-making, rank-and-file militancy, and salaries for officials closer to the pay of workers they represent. It would also be helpful if unions more consistently positioned themselves as champions of America’s working-class majority against the economic elite represented by Wall Street, while adopting Occupy’s brilliant popular framing of that class divide as a conflict between “them and us.”6

Unfortunately, many national unions, pre- and post-Occupy, utilize the same high-priced Democratic Party consultants, focus groups, and opinion polls that fuel the Obama administration’s endless conflation of “working class” and “middle class.” As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein argues, proclaiming yourself to be a defender of the latter “will only mislead and confuse.” The contemporary category of middle class “has no sense of agency, purpose, or politics—while the idea of a working class is (by virtual definition) a font of all of this.” Says Lichtenstein:

We need to construct a sense of class dignity and destiny for all those whose work fails to provide social recognition and economic wellbeing. We need to restore some definitional precision to those who truly constitute America’s working-class majority. Unionists and those who advocate on their behalf need to use the kind of language whose emotive power and historic resonance match the political audacity of those who occupied both the Wisconsin statehouse and the Wall Street parks. To speak on behalf of the working class is to begin to educate millions of Americans to the realization that their future is linked to their own capacity of organization and empowerment.7

As educational and empowering as they were, the Wisconsin and OWS protests proved hard to sustain. Both ultimately fell short of achieving their goals, which, in the case of OWS, tended to be far more diffuse than the demands echoing through the Wisconsin state capitol building when it was occupied. In Wisconsin, union-backed efforts to recall anti-union Governor Scott Walker failed at the polls, as did various legal challenges, so the Republican rollback of public-sector bargaining rights was still largely intact for the duration of his four-year term, if not longer.8

Return of the Strike

In 2012, while Obama’s reelection campaign commanded most of mainstream labor’s available resources and attention, there were further grassroots stirrings that pointed in a positive direction. The year’s biggest strike, by 25,000 public school teachers in Chicago, combined elements of the Wisconsin upsurge with the anti-corporate themes of OWS. Under new and more activist leadership, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) also provided a much-needed demonstration of the powerful synergy between union reform, internal democracy, workplace militancy, and effective community organizing.

Prior to the strike, CTU members elected new officers and board members from the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE). CORE remained active, as a reform group, after the election of new president Karen Lewis, and its members played a key role in the systematic internal organizing that CTU undertook to rebuild union structures and prepare for 2012 bargaining. CTU activists also did extensive outreach to the community to neutralize, as much as possible, anti-teacher union sentiment whipped up by city hall, the school board, and corporate-backed “education reform” groups.

When the CTU strike began, then Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney expressed his solidarity with Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who formerly served as Obama’s White House chief of staff. During the nine-day walkout, tens of thousands of students, parents, and other community members stuck with the teachers, making it difficult for Emanuel to isolate and demonize the CTU, as planned.9 In May 2013, CORE-backed Karen Lewis was elected to another three-year term as president of the CTU with 80 percent of the vote, a strong membership endorsement of her strike leadership during the previous year.

At the same time that the CTU was providing an inspiring example for embattled teachers everywhere, other workers in the private sector showed that similar militancy is possible. While strike activity in large established bargaining units has reached an all-time low in recent years, retail, warehouse, and fast-food workers, who lack collective bargaining rights, staged a series of walkouts over low pay and unfair labor practices that generated national publicity. These protest strikes involved low-wage workers who are pro-union. Unfortunately, under current legal conditions they have little realistic chance of winning union recognition at any single work site of the corporation that employs them, either directly or through a sub-contractor or franchisee.

So, they have banded together in broader and looser networks, like OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart) or Fast Food Forward, which generally disclaim unionization as a short-term goal. Instead, they have picketed, appealed to the public, and petitioned management for better pay and working conditions, with the backing of local workers’ centers or national unions, like the United Electrical Workers (UE), United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), or Service Employees International Union (SEIU). In the case of Warehouse Workers for Justice (aided by the UE in Illinois) and Warehouse Workers United (a group backed by Change-to-Win in California) one strike objective was to force Walmart to take responsibility for the personnel practices, including wage and hour violations, of the logistics chain staffing agencies that it employs.

In New York City, fast-food workers used their one-day work stoppage in November 2012 to protest the long-term wage stagnation of the nearly four million workers trapped in these $8 or $9 an hour jobs. The campaign there was kicked off by New York Communities for Change (NYCC), a successor to the now defunct community organization ACORN. NYCC had previously supported neighborhood-based organizing of immigrant workers at carwashes and supermarkets. To dramatize the plight of fast-food workers, NYCC joined forces with the SEIU, which provided more than $2.5 million to hire forty organizers and pay other campaign expenses in 2012.

As NYCC organizer Jonathan Westin explains, Fast Food Forward’s initial “roaming strike” was an approach influenced by Occupy because it involved “confronting [industry] power more openly and publicly and directly” than formal union drives in the past.10 Even though only a small fraction of the city’s 55,000 fast-food workers participated, media coverage was widespread and favorable. The initial New York City protest—and others patterned after it—generated new political pressure for long overdue minimum-wage increases, at the state or city level.

Last winter, both Fast Food Forward in New York and the SEIU-backed “Fight for 15” campaign in Chicago (to raise industry wages to $15 an hour) organized a broader round of protest activity at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Dunkin Donuts, Burger King, Subway, and similar chains. In Chicago, SEIU spent nearly $2 million jump-starting the campaign. Similar one-day walkouts and demonstrations soon followed in Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and other cities. Over the summer, even fast-food workers in southern locales like Memphis and Raleigh joined the fray. On December 5, 2013, organizers extended strike activity to first-time locations in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, as part of a projected two-hundred-city “day of action” by fast-food workers and their supporters. According to one journalistic observer, the rapid spread of Fight for 15, combined with recent Walmart strike activity, is generating a serious and sustained challenge “to two industries that increasingly define the new U.S. economy.”11 In Seattle, community college professor Kshama Sawant became the first socialist, in nearly a century, to be elected to municipal office there—after she campaigned as a Fight for 15 supporter. Also active in Occupy, Sawant won impressive union backing for her race against a centrist Democrat, who was a longtime incumbent with past ties to the local labor establishment.

Black Fridays

The parallel escalation of OUR Walmart organizing began in October 2012, when workers walked off the job in thirty stores in twelve states. On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving a month later, strike activity by four hundred Walmart workers—backed by a much larger number of labor-community supporters—spread to one thousand locations, in three times as many states. In the spring of 2013, Walmart workers and their supporters confronted store managers in one hundred locations to keep the pressure on Walmart to make scheduling improvements first promised after the Black Friday protests. In early June 2013, just prior to the company’s annual meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas, some workers tried to mount a longer work stoppage in several states where the OUR Walmart has been strongest. The nation’s largest employer responded by firing or suspending more than sixty workplace activists, including some who left their jobs to attend the shareholders meeting.12

On the eve of Black Friday last fall, the National Labor Relations Board announced its intention to issue a wide-ranging unfair labor practice complaint over management discrimination against the several thousand “associates” (Walmart’s name for its employees) who have signed up to be OUR Walmart members. The NLRB action would contest some of the retaliatory dismissals and a company-wide pattern of supervisory threats, intimidation, and interference with legally protected strike activity. With this timely legal boost, OUR Walmart reported Black Friday protests in 1,500 locations on November 28, 2013. Demonstrators waved picket signs and banners challenging the company to “Stop Bullying, Stop Firing, Start Paying.” (More than 800,000 of the company’s 1.3 million U.S.-based employees earn less than $25,000 a year.)13 Workers and their usual labor allies were joined by members of Congress, environmental and consumer activists, ministers, and economic justice advocates. Civil disobedience, which began with fifty arrests in Los Angeles two weeks before Black Friday, continued on the retailer’s busiest shopping day. More than twice that number of activists were jailed in the protests after Thanksgiving.

Back to the Future?

U.S. labor’s revived use of direct action harks back to an earlier era of industrial relations, prior to the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. It draws on organizational models more typical of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than the last seventy-five years. At a conference last year on “New Models of Worker Representation,” AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka declared that our “system of workplace representation is failing to meet the needs of America’s workers.” He touted “new models for organizing workers” that do not necessarily involve traditional collective bargaining relationships and pledged to assist “any worker or group of workers who wants to organize and build power in the workplace.”14

The “Alt-labor” initiatives now being embraced by the AFL-CIO reflect a broader conception of labor organization long championed by the left. Critics of “contract unionism,” like Stanley Aronowitz and others, have argued for years that union membership and functioning should not be defined by statute or limited to formal collective bargaining units. Losing a Labor Board election, not having enough support to get one, or lacking a union contract does not pose any legal barrier to workers acting collectively for their own benefit. With or without outside organizational backing, they can maintain workplace committees and engage in “concerted activity” aimed at getting management to improve wages, working conditions, and benefits. At least one well-known labor law professor, Charles Morris, has even argued that the NLRA supports such “minority union” efforts to engage employers in “members-only bargaining.”15 (Several labor attempts to get the real-existing NLRB to act on this theory have been unsuccessful in workplaces where union supporters had not yet demonstrated the majority support necessary for legal certification of a new collective bargaining unit.)

Not surprisingly, “do-it-yourself workplace organizing” was championed on the margins of organized labor, before it became, under duress, more mainstream. In their lively pamphlet, Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks, former Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Daniel Gross and labor historian Staughton Lynd recount the history of recent IWW skirmishing with the coffee-shop chain created by billionaire Howard Schultz.16 In 2004, the century-old radical union became active among New York City “baristas,” most of them part-timers, who were “fed up with living in poverty and being mistreated.” According to Gross and Lynd, Starbucks workers are not, as a practical matter, able to seek NLRB-sponsored elections “even if they wished to do so,” because the company “maintains that the appropriate bargaining unit for employees would be a prohibitively large multi-store unit.” In addition, the low-budget IWW has a political bias against even “using the statutory mechanism designed to produce exclusive bargaining representation.” When U.S. unions get legally certified, they acquire “the power to bargain away members’ rights to engage in concerted direct action.” That is why, the authors believe, “workers themselves on the shop floor, not outside union officials, are the real hope for labor’s future.”

Militant Minority Unionism?

Instead of seeking formal bargaining rights via NLRB-conducted representation elections, IWW supporters at Starbucks tried to extract concessions from the company through direct action on the job, combined with creative public protests and embarrassing publicity. (When Starbucks retaliated against inside organizers like Gross, the IWW did file unfair labor practice charges at the NLRB, just as OUR Walmart has done to contest the retaliatory dismissal of its supporters and other forms of illegal management behavior.) As one sign of the IWW’s impact, Gross and Lynd cite wage increases introduced by Starbucks, in response to New York City barista agitation, which “increased pay almost 25% in a period when retail wages in the city were essentially stagnant.”

In Massachusetts, an IWW-assisted online petition campaign and a threatened strike by shift supervisors won concessions from management worth a million dollars annually in bonuses and raises. This dispute broke out after Starbucks was forced to exclude its shift supervisors from sharing in tips—a practice that violated the wage-and-hour law rights of hourly workers. For some supervisors, however, this policy change meant a pay cut of nearly 20 percent. The supervisors sought help from the union for a protest campaign that led to an increase in their hourly wages from $11 to $13.59 and additional bonuses of $350. “I think this is the shape of things to come,” predicts IWW-activist Erik Forman. “Workers are deciding to take action on the job because capital is destroying the legal framework that unions have existed under in the U.S. since 1935 in the private and public sector.”

As a former fast-food worker himself, Forman finds the “prospect of a new militancy emerging with backing from bigger institutional players” to be “exciting.” Over the past year, he notes, “a wave of telegenic one-day fast food ‘strikes’ has exposed an ugly reality. The world of exploitation behind every hamburger and fries is hidden no longer.” But Forman worries that Fight for 15 may not represent a sufficient “departure from business unionism as usual.” Already, he reports, “rank-and-filers in the Fight for 15 have begun building their own organizations autonomous from the campaign bureaucracy, connecting with community supporters who are free from the fetters of a paycheck signed [by the SEIU].”17

Reflecting similar left skepticism, Labor Notes reporter Jenny Brown observed, with no small degree of wonder, that “after years of downplaying strikes, the union that’s funding fast food organizing is now embracing the tactic.” Some activists interviewed by Brown worry that SEIU is not “providing a sustainable organizing home beyond the workplace—particularly important in the high turn-over restaurant industry.” Others question whether “the union will commit sustained resources and not leave workers in the lurch if legislative goals [i.e., a higher minimum wage] aren’t immediately met.”18

After his own extensive interviews with Fight for 15 organizers around the country, In These Times writer Arun Gupta praised the campaign for “setting in motion thousands of working poor, mainly African Americans and Latinos” and “generating excitement that a popular movement can finally go on the offensive against corporate power.” Like Forman and Brown, however, he also expressed doubts about “whether Fight for 15 is fundamentally a worker organizing campaign or a ‘march on the media,’” masterminded by SEIU-funded PR consultants like BerlinRosen or Purpose, which helped “brand” the campaign as part of its own multinational promotion of “movement entrepreneurship.”19

Opening for the Left?

But other young leftists, including some directly involved in recent strike activity, see expanded opportunities for bottom-up organizing. According to Whole Foods worker Trish Kahle, the city-wide walk-out by two hundred fast-food and retail workers in Chicago last year emboldened nine coworkers in her own store to take a stand against “a draconian attendance policy and poverty wages.” Kahle notes that “strikes are nearly non-existent in shops like mine, and almost none of my co-workers have ever been in a union.” The cofounder and CEO of Whole Foods is Texas-based John Mackey, a libertarian union-buster who once famously compared unionization to herpes because “it won’t kill you, but it’s very unpleasant and will make a lot of people not want to be your lover.” Nevertheless, after joining the strike, Kahle got a raise from her store manager and more than a dozen other Whole Food workers all wanted to know how they could join “the union.”

“Is this a worker-run campaign that workers have conceptualized and carried out entirely by themselves? Not yet,” Kahle admits. “But workers are being transformed into union leaders for the first time by participating in this movement and radicals are in a position to shape it by rebuilding the tradition of radical unionism.” In Chicago, one other influence cited by Kahle is the local teachers’ union, whose striking members were seen as “standing up for all working people” in the fall of 2012. Months later, Kahle reports, “workers would break out into applause” whenever the CTU was mentioned at fast-food organizing meetings.20 She believes that picket-line fraternization between fast-food workers and rank-and-file SEIU members could raise expectations among the latter. “They’re thinking, ‘I only make $10 an hour and I’m in the SEIU,’” she says. “The people on top at the SEIU aren’t interested in organizing on the shop floor, but we are.”21

Texas labor activist Ryan Hill takes a similar ecumenical tact in his appraisal of both OUR Walmart and Fight for 15. “There’s an impressive boldness in both of these campaigns that we haven’t seen from labor in many years of defensive struggles, setbacks, and outright defeats,” Hill contends. “Many of the activists involved cite the Occupy encampments of two years ago as a formative political experience…. Most importantly, workers have been energized—not just any workers, but those in industries still largely considered ‘unorganizable.’”

In Hill’s view, “both campaigns have been building organizations that can keep workers plugged in for the long haul,” even if the current “layer of leaders, activists, and supporters within targeted companies is still thin.” He urges others on the left to forgo the comforts of armchair generalship, not to mention the temptations of Monday-morning quarterbacking. If more labor activists pitched in to build “independent support committees”—or better yet, took a job with an employer targeted by one of these campaigns—the “army of dedicated, militant, and motivated supporters” needed “to beat a company like Walmart or McDonalds” would be much stronger and deep-rooted.22

Whatever long-term fate awaits either campaign, the opportunity to be part of a “militant minority” within the working class—that is currently engaged in rediscovering older forms of labor struggle—is not one to be missed. And there is no better place to relearn lessons about workers’ capacity for self-organization and empowerment than struggles that are not going to be won if either force for change is constrained in any way.

Notes

↩Union security clauses typically require that all union-represented workers have either dues deducted from their paychecks or, if they choose to be non-members, an equivalent amount in the form of “agency fees.” The strongest form of union security requires everyone in the bargaining unit to become a union member. In September, 2013, a county judge struck down Indiana’s right-to-work law but the state supreme court was expected to uphold its constitutionality. See Tim Evans, “Indiana Attorney General Appeals Ruling That ‘Right-to-Work’ is Unconstitutional,” IndyStar, September 12, 2013, http://indystar.com.

↩Change To Win is the coalition of unions—now numbering only three—that broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005, with the original intention of creating a rival national labor federation.